ARRIVING AT THE bus station was a bit hard to explain to the twins. Whisper had accepted the It’s a surprise line, but when Saffron woke up, she had a million questions. Finally, Violet just opted for partial truth—we were going to visit their grandmother. Saffron practically squealed with delight, but Whisper had a big meltdown, crying and holding her breath till her lips turned blue and she collapsed in noisy, gulping, hiccupping sobs. I wondered what she’d been imagining. Some other, more exciting kind of surprise, I guess. Probably one involving fairies or ice-cream sundaes or water slides. Being Whisper, she wasn’t telling.
But finally, we were off. The Greyhound smelled different from city buses in Victoria—sort of nice but in a chemical way, like air freshener maybe—and there were actual fabric-covered seats instead of plastic benches. Ty sat across the aisle, eating pretzels from the snack bag on his lap and playing a game on Violet’s phone. Violet and Saffron sat together behind me, and Whisper sat with me and almost immediately dozed off. I guessed the meltdown had worn her out. I stroked her head. Her hair was matted, and I could smell the chlorine from her swim the day before.
I stared out the window and watched trees flash past in a blur of green. Nothing felt real: not this road, not our destination, not the weight of Whisper’s head on my lap. But for the first time in weeks, worry wasn’t sharp and jangling in my belly. I felt weirdly calm. At least I am doing something, I thought. At least I am taking action.
It was almost exactly what Mom had said about this whole stupid family trip—At least we’re taking action, Wolf. I shivered. Did Mom have that jangle in her belly too? Was that why she was dragging us across the country?
I looked down at Whisper, fast asleep, her eyelashes spiky and dark against her pale cheeks, and wished I could know for sure if I was doing the right thing.
Sometimes I envied bees. Not the way they were dying off, obviously, but the way their roles were all neatly laid out for them. Like, if you were a worker bee, you flew around and visited flowers and drank nectar and collected pollen to bring back to the hive, and that was it. You even generated static electricity when you flew so that when you landed on a flower, the pollen pretty much leaped onto you. You didn’t have to make decisions or think about what you wanted to do when you grew up or wonder whether you were doing the right thing by basically kidnapping your little sisters.
When I was working on my bee project, I’d watched a documentary about how bees used to be practically worshipped in ancient times—there are all kinds of old carvings and paintings and stuff with bee images in them. People thought they were prophetic. If they settled on your roof or whatever, it meant good things would happen.
I’ve never been a superstitious kind of person at all, but still, I couldn’t shake off the question, What did it mean if the bees started flying away from their hives, abandoning their young, dying—or, more often, just disappearing?
I didn’t know the answer, but it couldn’t be anything good. And I wasn’t against what my mom was doing. Not really. I understood why she felt she had to do it.
I just hoped she would understand why I had to do this.
After a couple of hours, Saffron and Whisper were both squirmy and restless. From the seat behind me, I could hear Saffron asking why Mom wasn’t with us.
“She’s meeting us there,” Violet said.
“I want to sit with Whisper.”
“Yeah, okay.” Violet got out of her seat and stood in the aisle.
I nudged Whisper. “Sit with Saffy for a bit, okay?”
Whisper switched seats, snuggling up to Saffron. I expected Violet to join Ty—he had an empty seat beside him—but she dropped down beside me instead.
“Wolf, we have to talk.”
“About what?” It seemed to me that the decisions were all behind us, back in Chilliwack. All there was to do now was sit on the bus until we arrived in Nelson…and then it was out of our hands, really. Maybe Vi’s grandmother would help us and maybe she wouldn’t, but there wasn’t much we could do about it.
“Me and Ty?” She lowered her voice so it was just a fraction above a whisper. “We’re not gonna stay in Nelson.”
“What do you mean?” I stared at her. “What are you going to do?”
She shrugged. “Ty’s got friends in Calgary. We might head out there.”
“Calgary,” I repeated. All I knew about Calgary was that it had a Stampede and lots of snow in the winter.
“Yeah. His friends have a band, and Ty’s pretty good with a guitar, right? And they have a place we can stay until we figure out a way to make some money.”
“What about high school?” I said, like that was the most important thing.
Vi rolled her eyes. “I’d have more luck finishing high school in Calgary than I do with Jade and my dad.”
“But what about—what about me?” My voice came out too loud, and I had to swallow back the wail that almost slipped out with the last word. “I mean…you’re just going to leave us? Me and the twins?”
“We’ll make sure you get to my grandmother’s place and everything,” Vi said. She was staring down at her hands, picking at a hangnail, not looking at me.
“But why? Why can’t we just stay together?”
“Because I want to live my own life,” she said. “I want to be with Ty, and I know my dad and Jade don’t like him. And I’m tired of being told what to do all the time.”
It seemed to me that Violet had a lot more freedom than most kids her age. “You’re only fifteen,” I said.
“Whatever,” she said. “That’s not the point. Ty and I can look after ourselves.”
I swallowed. “Promise me you’ll still go to school.”
She rolled her eyes. “Not much point, is there? Not if the world is ending.”
“You don’t believe that, do you? Not really?” Violet had always been the skeptic in the family. I counted on her for it.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Do you?”
I didn’t answer immediately. I looked away from her, out the window, at the green trees and the clearing sky, and the sun ahead of us in the east, a golden glow you couldn’t look at, not even through the tinted windows. I thought of Anna, and her words came back to me as clearly as if she were sitting right there on the bus with us. “You know Anna was in a war?” I said. “And she escaped?”
Violet’s eyebrows lifted. “Seriously?”
“Yeah. She told me that she thought the world was ending, but it didn’t. And she said that there’s always been people who’ve thought the world was coming to an end. And it never has. And she said that she thinks things get better, not worse.”
“Deep,” Violet said.
“Don’t,” I said. “Don’t make fun of her.”
“Sorry.” She chewed on her bottom lip, and neither of us spoke for a minute.
Then Violet cleared her throat. “It’s just…It’s hard, you know? Like, I don’t really agree with Jade or anything, and I think the whole world-is-ending”—she made air quotes around it—“thing is stupid, but still. How do you plan for the future when…”
“When your own parents don’t believe you have one?”
“Yeah.” Violet’s eyes were shining, and her voice wobbled. “I don’t actually want to run away, you know. But I think maybe I have to.”
My throat ached from holding back my own tears. “Yeah,” I managed. “I know. I know.”
Taking a ten-hour bus ride with two five-year-olds is not something I would ever recommend to anyone. We switched seats so often it was like playing musical chairs. Ty told Buzzy Bee stories until his voice gave out: Buzzy Bee Quits School, Buzzy Bee Rides a Roller Coaster, Buzzy Bee Gets a Skateboard, Buzzy Bee Plays the Drums. Every time he finished one, Saffron loudly demanded another.
The stories weren’t bad, actually. I had a whole new respect for Ty.
But despite stories and snacks and snuggles, after a few hours the twins were losing it. By midafternoon, Whisper had had a meltdown that I thought might actually get us kicked off the bus; Saffron, who never got car sick, had thrown up all over Violet’s lap; and a nosy middle-aged woman had asked us too many questions about where our parents were. The time passed so slowly it was like we were caught in Duncan’s Temporal Anomaly computer game.
The only good thing about that bus was that it finally arrived in Nelson, and we got to get off.
And that was a whole new kind of awful.